They are probably trickled off at this point. Getting trickled on, which is what the legislation is all about, is not the kind of thing we want to see in Canada.
We would maybe welcome a change in legislation if in fact it meant that there would actually be real competition so the average citizen would benefit by lower service charges, by a greater range of services and by easier access to financial services. The legislation will do the opposite. It will put pressure on the existing banking system to cut back to enable it to compete at the high end level.
What does cutback mean? It means a whole bunch of people will lose their jobs. A whole bunch of people will lose access to branches in their various communities. Branches will be closed. The banks have already acknowledged this. The Royal Bank the other day suggested that it would have to cut back at last $400 million in the next little while.
Cutting back $400 million means a whole lot of people who have jobs today will not have them. A whole lot of people will be inconvenienced so that the Royal Bank of Canada can compete at the upper end of the commercial lending market.
What is our job here? Is it not our job as elected representatives to protect the interests of ordinary people? We do not have to protect the interests of banks. Goodness, they have small armies of lawyers, financial experts and lobbyists and unlimited amounts of money. They do not need our protection.
The average Canadian expects us to represent their interests. That is why the folly of this debate today and this discussion is to give the illusion to people sitting in the gallery that somehow this is an important debate when the deal was cut two years ago when the Minister of Finance said “I promise that we will pass legislation permitting foreign banks in Canada before June 1999”.
What are we doing here? We all are like a bunch of rubber stamps. Stamp, stamp, stamp, that is all we end up doing now. As long as we understand we are just rubber stamps, then that is fair enough, but let us not pretend to anybody listening to this debate that this is meaningful in any way. The Minister of Finance has decided on this.
Let us understand what this reveals. Who runs this country? Who runs this government? Is it the members of parliament elected by their constituents who make decisions? The answer is clearly no. Is it the cabinet that sits there in secret and makes decisions? The answer is absolutely no. One person sitting over there makes all the decisions, the Minister of Finance. He made the decision on whether we should have foreign banking. Was it discussed among the Liberal caucus members? No, it was not.